Assange, one of the site’s original creators, is an Australian-born hacker and writer with a social conscience, who now lives in East Africa. Among other achievements, he co-invented Rubberhose deniable encryption, which would let a dissident being tortured reveal one key to unlock a hard drive, while not giving away that there was a second or third password-locked folder of information.

”He is not politically motivated. He is more concerned with truth and the quest for it. He is certainly not party political. I think he sees that there are good people on both sides of politics and definitely bad people. He is a very brave person. He is absolutely convinced that it is worth taking high personal risks in exchange for getting truth out to the community.”

During the last 12 months WikiLeaks representatives have been talking at numerous conferences, from technology via human rights to media focused,in an effort to introduce WikiLeaks to the world. WikiLeaks has had major document releases that have spawned attention in all major newspapers by now, it has triggered important reform and has establisheditself as part of the accepted media reality.

The July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrikes were carried out by two United States Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, in the district of New Baghdad in Baghdad, during the occupation of Iraq. The helicopters carried out three airstrikes, two incidents in which 30 mm caliber rounds were used — wounding two children and killing several men, including Reuters news staff Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen — and athird incident in which three AGM-114 Hellfire missiles were used to destroy a building.

Iceland is at a unique crossroads. Because of an economic meltdown in the banking sector, a deep sense is among the nation that a fundamental change is needed in order to prevent such events from taking place again. At such times it is important to seek a collective future vision and take a course that will bring the nation and the parliament closer together.

On February 17th a parliamentary resolution will be filed at the Icelandic parliament suggesting that Iceland will position itself legally with regard to the protection of freedoms of expression and information. This suggestion for a future vision has sparked great enthusiasm both within the parliament and among those it has been introduced to.

According to Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF), Iceland went from being placed first in the world for freedom of expression (2007) to 9th (2009). It is time this trend was rectified.

Sitting at the bottom of the mountain in Iceland, there was time enough last week to reflect on this country’s importance in the struggle between theworld’s internet users and state secrecy, never better represented than by publication by Wikileaks of a video showing the slaughter of more than a dozen people by an American helicopter gunship in Baghdad.

Sweden’s stringent whistleblower laws are protecting the anonymity of sources that have been feeding the controversial Wikileaks website with sensitive government and corporate information, according to Swedish political sources.

According to Daniel Schmitt, a WikiLeaks spokesman, the site exists to “ensure the legally and technically protected retrieval of information from anonymous sources and to make available this information for the general public.” It provides a secure online submission system for whistleblowers to upload documents, which WikiLeaks then makes availableglobally over the Web.

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month (.pdf) analyzes howthe U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France — in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it — so much for all the recent veneration of “consent of the governed” — and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: “Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters,” proclaims the title of one section.

A second veteran of Bravo Company 2-16, Ethan McCord, has spoken out about the incident shown in the Wikileaks video “Collateral Murder”. Ethan is seen in the video rushing a wounded child (pictured Right) to amedical vehicle.

Wikileaks describes itself as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. Wikileaks is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing “highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services.” PRQ is said to have “almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs.” PRQ is owned by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij who, through their involvement in The Pirate Bay, have significant experience in withstanding legal challenges from authorities. Being hosted by PRQ makes it difficult to take Wikileaks offline. Furthermore, “Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information.” Such arrangements have been called “bulletproof hosting”.

Wikileaks’s core strength — its distributed and seemingly phantom-like presence on the net — has yet to be tested legally or technically. The domain name owner lives in Kenya and purposely doesn’t know much about Wikileaks. The site, which looks to be hosted from a server in Sweden, has multiplemirrors around the world.

One of Wikileaks’ advisers, security expert Ben Laurie, doesn’t even know who runs the site — other than Assange — or where the servers are.

In a brief biographical description appended to an article Assange wrote in 2006 on political hacking, he is described as “president of a NGO and Australia’s most infamous former computer hacker. He was convicted of attacks on the U.S. intelligence and publishing a magazine which inspired crimes against the Commonwealth.”

Stay mysterious: WikiLeaks’ host, PRQ, provides “highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services,” as used by torrent site The PirateBay, in Sweden. The site has no official headquarters.

Be cagey about your founders: “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa” are the people behind the launch.

Know your enemy: Anyone in power, basically. Although its aim is to expose oppressive regimes in “Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa,” at the moment it is western Governments who are feeling the heat most of all.

Keep your staff count low: There are just five full-time people on the site, although another 800 do occasional work.

The BJB documents were submitted to Wikileaks by ex-employee Rudolf Elmer. Elmer approached newspapers in his native Switzerland and tried to alert the Swiss tax authorities and the police to what he described as serious tax evasion. But no one was interested. On January 9, 2008, Elmer published the documents on Wikileaks. “Wikileaks was the only tool I had to raise my voice,” says Elmer, speaking to Wired from his Mauritius home.

Wikileaks’s nine-member “advisory board” includes Assange and another Australian, Phillip Adams, who has worked here as a broadcaster, film producer and writer for 2UE, ABC Radio National, The Australian, The Age and The Bulletin.

Adams, who has received two Orders of Australia, is also chairman of the Film, Radio and Television Board, a foundation member of the Australia Council and has chaired the Australian Film Institute, the Australian Film Commission, Film Australia and the National Australia Day Council.Assange said there were over 100 Australian PhD students, journalists and other volunteers working on Wikileaks.

During the last 12 months WikiLeaks representatives have been talking at numerous conferences, from technology via human rights to media focused,in an effort to introduce WikiLeaks to the world. WikiLeaks has had major document releases that have spawned attention in all major newspapers by now, it has triggered important reform and has establisheditself as part of the accepted media reality.

The founder of Cryptome.org and veteran publisher of suppressed documents joins us to discuss what can be learned from the Wikileaks phenomenon, including the ways that information leaks can themselves be manipulated. We also discuss corporate complicity in government surveillance of the internet.

An open platform for the anonymous publishing of compromising documents; according to Time Magazine, Wikileaks could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act. Honorable analogy for sure, but one earned at the expense of powerful players like Sarah Palin, Kaupthing Bank and lately, with the controversial book Jaeger, the Danish Ministry of Defense. Praised for its democratic devotion and threatened by the shadier powers that be, each day is a victory for Wikileaks.